Board & Card Games Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for people who like playing board games, designing board games or modifying the rules of existing board games. It's 100% free, no registration required.

The Special Event cards all indicate they may be played "at any time". Are there any restrictions to "any time", i.e. in the middle of someone's turn? Suppose an epidemic card has been drawn -- can the airlift card be played while the epidemic steps are being applied?

2 Answers
2

You can play the cards at any time, however, you can't play them
between an event and the representation of the event on the board.
Some scenarios may help explain this:

Scenario 1: Player #1 has a Special Event card for "Resilient
Population." During the draw, an Epidemic card is drawn. Since an
Epidemic card was drawn, player #1 decides to play their Special Event
card to remove a city from the infection discard pile before they are
reshuffled. This is legal because the card was played before the cards
were reshuffled.

Scenario 2: A player may use the Forecast card to rearrange the cards
on the top of the infection deck before they're drawn -- but once a
card is drawn, the player can't rearrange the cards.

Scenario 3: The Red disease has been [cured but not eradicated]. A player draws the
Taipei card which results in the 8th outbreak. Since no time elapses
between the drawing of the Taipei card (resulting in the infection)
and the placing of the cubes (representing the infection), the players
lose the game. It's not OK to Airlift the medic over to Taipei to cure
because the cubes have already been added and the game has already
been lost.

So in your specific example, yes you can play the Airlift card, if you do so between Epidemic steps.

In a more recent BGG thread concerning the 2nd edition, the designer has clarified this rule further (be sure to check Matt's second post there).

In short, in the 2nd edition at least, you cannot use a special event card after an epidemic card has been revealed, until the epidemic process has been fully played out. An exception to this is the "Resilient Population" card, as stated on the card.